Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is the direct follow-up to the first game, serving as both a sequel and a prequel. This time the gameplay is centered around a bigger cast of characters who each have their own point of view regarding the events. Dennis Wedin, the game's co-creator has stated that most of the gameplay mechanics are intact and that players will get to experiment with new weapons, new and more gory finishing moves and a complete story arc that will end the series. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number currently costs $14.99. A collector's edition was also released for $60 at iam8bit.com, and includes the game, its soundtrack on three 180 gram vinyls and digital format, and a "Phone Hom" telephone card with a code to unlock the game. Steam Store: Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number link. Gameplay The gameplay is mostly identical to that of the first game. Two of the original masks make a return, while new masks will offer new and exciting abilities and playstyles. New tweaks to normal gameplay have been added, including executing with guns. The difficulty has increased as well, along with two levels implemented (Normal and Hard) for people who believed the first game was either too hard or easy. Hotline Miami 2 has a Hard difficulty mode, which can only be unlocked when the player beats the game. On Hard, enemies are more difficult to take down, some abilities may be taken away from the player, such as enemy-locking, when the player picks up a gun the ammo in the gun is halved (rounded down if uneven), and the level is flipped, with increased enemies and windows, and less doors. Hotline Miami 2 has a lot more weapons than Hotline Miami: with returning weapons from Hotline Miami, cut weapons, and entirely new weapons. A level editor was scheduled to release in Spring 2015 but has been delayed in order to make further "player requested" improvements and features. Story SPOILER WARNING: PLOT DETAILS BELOW Hotline Miami 2 takes place before and after the events of the original, focusing more on the latter, between October and December 1991. The game suggests that Jacket's interpretation is the canonical ending of the first game. In this version of events, Jacket is unwittingly manipulated into killing off the leadership of the Russian Mob by a neo-nationalist organization known as 50 Blessings. After the previous game's ending, Jacket was captured by the authorities and put on trial, and his exploits have achieved national infamy. The persona of "Richard", a mysterious figure in a rooster mask that occasionally appeared to Jacket in the original game, has been appearing to certain individuals who are involved with 50 Blessings and Jacket's murder spree. The game features multiple points of view that take place at different points in time. The multiple protagonists are: The Pig Butcher a.k.a Martin Brown A fictionalized version of Jacket in the slasher/exploitation film "Midnight Animal," portrayed by a famed actor named Martin Brown who is in the throes of a mental breakdown. The Fans Though most people view Jacket as a murderer, other people became swept into the idea of masked vigilantes, and obsess over the phone calls Jacket received. A gang of murderous vigilantes who view Jacket as a hero and try to emulate him. Playable fans include Tony (Tiger Mask), Mark (Bear Mask), siblings Alex and Ash (Swan Masks), and Corey (Zebra Mask). Notably, Alex and Corey are the first playable female characters in the series. Their arc portrays them as they fall deeper into depravity and violence, while Corey becomes more worried and disillusioned with the group. With no Russian mobsters to kill, the group slaughters various gangs of thugs in hopes of gaining attention. Detective Manny PardoCategory:Games A police detective who is investigating Jacket's murders, among others. He is close friends with Evan. Manny spends the game killing groups of thugs in similar vigilante style to Jacket; he uses his police badge to claim self defense. He also visits murder scenes which feature brutally murdered victims along with notes stating they "didn't want to do it". In his dream sequence it is heavily insinuated that he is the one murdering criminals and mutilating their corpses whilst he had created the "Miami Mutilator" as a work of fiction. He is named after a psychopathic Florida cop who went on a three month killing spree in 1986 in which he killed drug dealers exclusively. Evan Evan is a writer who is writing a book about the events of the first Hotline Miami. His story starts in a courthouse where he is seen taking notes. His playstyle revolves around trying not to get people hurt, but if he crosses a certain threshold, he will use deadly force. His attacks are initially non-lethal, but executing two downed enemies will cause him to take off his jacket and enter an adrenaline-induced rage mode. The Henchman A Russian mobster with no masks, similar to Pardo and Evan, who seems to be held in high regards by the The Son, but wants to get out of the game. His segments start midway through the 1991 arc, during which he completes one last job for The Son. The Son A man who also doesn't wear a mask, notable for having the abilities of all of the fans except Alex and Ash. He is the son of The Russian Boss from the previous game, and the boss of The Henchman. Shown with a drug addiction, the drugs appear to have a hallucinogenic effect, which lead him into going on a rampage before walking off the side of the building. The Soldier A special forces Lieutenant stationed in Hawaii in 1985 alongside the protagonist of the first game. He is a younger version of "Beard", and serves alongside Jacket in his unit, the Ghost Wolves, in the midst of a losing war with the USSR on Hawaii. Richter The rat-masked killer from the first game, first appeared Hotline Miami as the man who kills Jacket's girlfriend and sends him to the hospital. His story is told through flashbacks during a phone call with Evan, who he tells of his experience in 50 Blessings. Jake The original owner of the Jake mask (found dead in the Hotline Miami level Hot & Heavy) returns in Hotline Miami 2. An obese man with a choice of snake masks in 1989. He is an unwitting member of 50 Blessings, like Jacket, though he views his mysterious employers with contempt and desires to find the truth. He is found dead in the original game, and his story in Wrong Number parallels the plot of the first game. Ending Themes Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number represents a massive shift in tone from the original game. The colors have shifted from hazy neon pastels to stark dark purples lacking any kind of visual blur to them. Sun Araw's psychedelic music is completely omitted, replaced with tracks such as a melancholy untitled menu song by The Green Kingdom, calm remorseful songs like Modulogeek's Around, and exhausted on-the-job beats like Old Fox Future Gang's Guided Meditation. The characters, in stark contrast to Jacket and Biker, are largely identified by their job titles or actual names instead of their possessions. Dialogue, while unanimously terse and filled with natural awkward silences, is more prevalent and each character uses it slightly differently. This variety of expanded and diversified characteristics and focus on a wide array of lifestyles creates a sobering effect next to the original game. This parallels the shift in primary setting from 1980's to the much culturally calmer 1990's. Violence in 1991 feels aimless: the Russian mob is gone (similar to how the Cold War was basically over by this point in history), and the Fans often note that the people they target prior to Death Wish are disturbingly similar to themselves, even having similar colored and decorated hang outs (Down Under) and a shared interest in exercise and recreational marijuana. Drugs are touched on much more soberly in Hotline Miami 2, focusing more on the kinds of people who use, transport, and attempt to control them. Alex is a recreational user of marijuana and her technician brother Ash frequently bashes people on the basis of being junkies. Police Detective Pardo (based on a real MDPD officer who declared himself a soldier and murdered six people) is shown cracking down excessively hard on Colombian drug smuggling (Dead Ahead) and this is later revealed to be a function of his own personal self righteous power fantasies. Pardo tries to have a meeting with the Russian mob immediately afterward, implying he did the job to earn their trust, or is perhaps angling to take them down too just as brutally. Flashback missions to a fully fictional Hawaii warzone perhaps most analogous historically to America's involvement in Nicaragua trace the source of violence acceptability in the other direction: here even Barnes and Daniels, wholly likable people with friendly personalities, also are expected to and do enjoy executing and beating prisoners (Ambush outro). The over exaggerated Hawaiian jungle -- complete with panthers as a triple origin story for 50 Blessings, the Brandon mask, and the Father's pet panthers -- is heavily used to give context to events in the subsequent settings, but also to draw an analogy between humans and the animal conditions that created them. When the Russian Henchman asks to go home in Execution, he also mentions he wants to go to the jungle. The absorption of humans into animal traits is a theme that's been with Hotline Miami since the first game's tutorial, and the endgame for Hotline Miami 2 naturally builds this to a head where characters become the animals they pretend to be. Throughout all of this the player's impulse to catalog it manifests in the character of Evan Wright, who is also based on a real Miami writer who writes about real Miami criminals. Due to the focus on lifestyle, however, the writer is entirely defined on his sinking unhealthy amounts of time into retrieving overlooked information. Exposing schemes with his information isn't so much his concern as much as the fact that he could write a popular book with that socially trending information and make money to support his family. The exact gigantic scale of the impending disaster is never made clear to writer or the player until the last minute of the game and by then choice to abandon the investigation or quickly publish his narrow view of events has already been made; in fact, even choosing to continue to investigate isn't done so with the urgency required to stop the ending from happening anyway. The emphasis here is on natural personal blind spots. Similar to Biker in the password ending to Hotline Miami people are shown to have limits on what they care about and things like the global and political rarely factor in. Writer's perspective on other characters is noticeably limited: he has a close friendship with Pardo due to a mutual interest in garnering fame, Manny fears that Evan knows too much (Caught), but it only ever amounts to Evan calling him a douchebag. In the Bar of Broken Heroes, Evan refuses to press Biker for details as it would require giving the extremely unhealthy looking Biker 200 dollars of booze money, and Evan determines this would be wrong. Flashes to the 1989 setting from the first game detail the lives of Jake and Richter, both of which play up different aspects of the original game's Jacket. Jake is the patriotic pizza eater who hates his job loves his car and can't hold a steady relationship, and Richter is the torn man backed into a corner with everything to lose. These characters allow for much more distilled tones than Jacket and have vastly different soundtracks and feels. Jake is summed up by the fact that one of his songs is named Quixotic: he's a naive idealist who's comical detachment from reality is ultimately his own downfall. Richter on the other hand is a story of personal growth and maturity as he progressively cools to his extremely dangerous jobs and earns the happiness of himself and his mother. Richter relies on pity to survive his prison whacking (the anonymous thrown pipe gift in Release), but his abilities and quick reactions under stress are what really make him win the day. His levels are cramped fast moving frenzies which train in him the jumpiness that got Jacket's girlfriend killed in the original game. This sympathy building emotional conflict is compounded by his dying mother for whom he is the sole caretaker. The spectre of some long gone "loner" father hangs above the large house and Richter himself is unemployed. Inadequacy issues and fatalism hang over all of his scenes, levels like House Call mark a somberly playful transition into the purple shades of the 90's, a depressing transition foreshadowing an ending that he'll be the first to see. As Richter finally fully trades in his innocence for competence in Release the game transitions to the Son, who also has inadequacy issues surrounding his dead kingpin Father but has few qualms wresting the drug throne back from the Colombians, at least until the ultimate futility of trying to please a dead man dawns on him (Blood Money); however, he continues onward seeing no other path for himself. He confides in his one friend, the Henchman, that "as soon as you let yourself get attached to anyone, you're fucked." The Henchman, who wears a tan similar to the Hawaiian soldiers indicating his middle age, is made increasingly nervous by the Son's dangerous aspirations to alter the balance of criminal power in Miami, and asks to be allowed to leave. The Son very reluctantly gives him one final mission, but is already advertising the prospects of coming back as he gives him a free sample of a new product (which are pills, rolling with the increasing pharmaceutical usage in the nineties). Henchman leaves, and must pass a much more expensive car to get to his own. Henchman is reclaiming a recently defecting chop shop that happens to help fix the Fan's van. Subtly conveyed themes of poor people striving for material gains, and of the older generation fearing to be swept up completely by the new, abound as the aging Henchman murders a dozen teenagers with a skateboard surrounded by impossibly expensive cars and older cars being scrapped for their good parts, just as the Henchman says he feels he'll get killed any day now and rejects the more youthful aspirations of the Son; he then dreams of a new car instead of his girlfriend. He awakes to find that his final pay and his car have been stolen by her and that the Son was right. Dejected he takes the pills and attempts to call either Mary or the Son but in his disoriented state dials a completely wrong number. The Son plays out his war alone and after a climactic assault on the Colombian headquarters he has finally brought about a return to the monolithic multicolored drug fortresses of old, and in doing so attracts the same anti-Russian Cold War sentiments, desperately looking for ground in the confused and barren 1990's. There is now nothing to distract him from his aimless inadequacies and like his grandfather he feels he's grown into the throne like a wheelchair. He tries to find solace in the friendship of Henchman but he's already been taken by this new setting. Everything unique has been bled out of it and all that remains are his monotonous army of faceless goons. In this mindset he turns to hallucinogens and hits them hard. As the Fans attack looking for some kind of vindication of their own feelings a confused Son does the only thing he knows how to do: kill everything until he wins. Reality seems to rewind back to that warzone where all was accepted but the camaraderie is no longer there, only the jungle and the wild animals that took his friend, glimpses of empty Russian rituals and piles of money destroyed and consumed instantly without thought. As he kills each animal one could easily recall Richter's father's room, decked out in pelts and heads as decoration and personal trophies. The sudden killing of every character pans over near still images of their final moments, most unaware entirely that they're about to die. The contrast in how each character goes out ironically generates an extremely distilled value of lifestyles and happiness in the face of oblivion. The characters who die with loved ones are the characters with the ability to form them, and the characters who die alone would have never reached out anyway. Parallels in Other Media The Hotline Miami 2 poster strongly resembles the poster to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Themes of the ambiguity between media and reality are explored in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, which is also the title of the ambiance after a level is cleared. Martin Brown's solid pink phones are references to the solid colors of surreal items in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and surreal phone calls in David Lynch's Lost Highway. Surreal phone calls and an escape to Hawaii are featured in Punch-Drunk Love. The alternating focus between vast areas and detailed often ugly faces, as well as sparse brief dialogue, is a style often used in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns such as The Man With No Name Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West. The tracks over Homicide and First Blood are both direct references to James Cameron's The Terminator. First Blood is a reference to the original Rambo movie First Blood. The organization and goals of 50 Blessings are very analogous to the fight club from David Fincher's Fight Club. The idea of cycling through a vast array of characters and criminals in a city with themes of violent media is present in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The Son's blaring white suit during Apocalypse is similar to John Woo protagonists such as Ah John / "Shrimp Head" from The Killer. The Colonel is a double reference to Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now ''and Lt. General Jack D. Ripper from ''Dr. Strangelove: or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The bags of money acquired by the Russian Henchman and Richter are both references to the 2011 movie Drive, as is the fact that both these characters are on the run with a woman to lose. The idea of different characters all meeting a surrealistic entity, reacting differently to it, and dying is present in The Seventh Seal. Manny Pardo, while based on a real person, has parallels to Dirty Harry from Dirty Harry ''and Cobra Cobretti from the movie ''Cobra, the latter of which subsequently inspired the Driver from Drive. Evan Wright is based on the writer of Cocaine Cowboys. The idea of extremely violent outlaws dying in a climatic suicide mission can be found in The Wild Bunch. The Son has a scar on his face, does cocaine and is a mafia head in Miami with animosity toward South Americans, similar to Tony Montana from Scarface. Many Russians in Hotline Miami 2 commit suicide, similar to how most Russian media implicitly endorses suicide. The concept of using both a gun and a chainsaw and a character named Ash is found in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy. The concept of a writer who alienates his family writing about killers is found in the David Fincher drama Zodiac. ReceptionCategory:GamesCategory:Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number The game received generally positive reviews from critics. It received an aggregated score of 75.90% on GameRankings based on 40 reviews and 76/100 on Metacritic based on 61 reviews. Danny O'Dwyer from GameSpot gave the game a 9/10, praising its techno and intense soundtrack, entertaining, engaging and challenging gameplay, well-designed controls, striking and vibrant visuals, improved enemy placement, lengthy story, as well as the huge variety of characters, levels and locations. He also praised the game for allowing players to use multiple approaches towards a single objective. However, he criticized the lack of weapon customization. He summarized the game by saying that "This is a confident follow-up which improves upon the original in almost every way. This is a tremendously stylish game which entertains throughout, and delights in forcing you out of your comfort zone. Chris Carter from Destructoid also awarded the game a 9/10, praising the open-ended gameplay, engrossing story, accessible interface and level-creator, as well as the game for allowing players to utilize creativity and strategy in every level. However, he criticized the poor AI. He summarized the game by saying that "Hotline Miami 2 may not be as "profound" as its predecessor, but it's still a bloody good time." Chloi Rad from IGN gave the game a 8.8/10, praising its high replay value, engaging story, sizable maps, rich characters' backstory, character-specific abilities, the improved lock-on system as well as the level-design, which demands players a new and more cautious approach towards dangers. However, she criticized the occasionally frustrating levels. She summarized the review by saying that "Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is a great game and a worthy sequel. It’s more confident in its style, storytelling ability, and level design than the first game." Steven Burns from VideoGamer.com gave the game a 7/10, while praising the narrative as well as the brutal violence featured in the game, which he stated "has tread a fine, sophisticated line between titillation, power, and reflection, an integral part of both narrative and mechanics.", he criticized the over-sized maps, as well as the game for being overly difficult, frustrating as enemy attack players where they can't be seen from the camera angle. and restrictive as the game enforced players to play on certain way very often. Chris Thursten from PC Gamer gave the game a 57/100, criticizing the meaningless characters, alienating rape scene, rigid playstyle restriction, inconsistent AI, frustrating and unavoidable death as well as technical issues. He summarized the review by saying that "Restrictive design decisions sap the energy from a series that revels in it, and technical issues deal the killing blow." Category:Weapons Category:Hotline Miami games